Economics and Evolution of the Internet Ecosystem
Srinivas Shakkottai
Department of Electrical Engineering
Department of Management Science and Engineering
Stanford University
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
4:30 - 5:30 PM
Terman Engineering Center, Room 453
Abstract:
In the first part of the talk, we examine how transit and customer
prices are set in a network consisting of multiple Internet service
providers (ISPs). Some ISPs may face an identical set of circumstances
in terms of potential customer pool and running costs. We examine the
existence of equilibrium strategies in this situation, and show how
positive profit can be achieved using threat strategies. We show that
if the number of ISPs competing for the same customers is large then it
can lead to price wars, resulting in a natural oligopoly. We also show
that ISPs that are not co-located are linked economically through a
sequence of providers forming a hierarchy, and we study their
interaction by considering a multi-stage game.
In the second half, we seek an analytical model of Internet evolution at
the level of autonomous systems (ASes), that is based solely on
parameters available from Internet measurement. We develop a model in
stages with two kinds of ASes -- ISPs and non-ISPs, and add an increasing
amount of detail about the interaction between players at each stage. At
each stage we validate the model using historical and current empirical
measurements from BGP routing tables. As our model develops we show how
its dynamics naturally produces a topology similar to the current
AS-level topology.
Bio:
Srinivas Shakkottai received the M.S. (2003) and PhD (2007) degrees,
both in electrical engineering, from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. He is currently a post-doctoral scholar at the Dept.
of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.
His research interests include the design and analysis of wireless
ad-hoc networks, peer-to-peer systems, pricing approaches to resource
allocation in networks, game theory, network congestion control and the
measurement and analysis of Internet data.
Srinivas is the recipient of the National Merit Scholarship, and the
Young Scientist Fellowship (Dept. of Science and Technology, Govt. of
India) and the International Programs in Engineering Fellowship at the
University of Illinois.
Operations Research Colloquia: http://or.stanford.edu/oras_seminars.html